Centennial Banana Slugs. Here at Truman we are going to be promoting intra-building competition next academic year. Every dorm will have their own color (Centennial is yellow) and hopefully a mascot too. I tried to get my staff to pick something basic like “Centennial All-Stars” or “Centennial Lions,” but they wanted to be the Banana Slugs.

I’ve finally given in and whipped up a couple of different t-shirt designs. Feedback is appreciated.

Update: By far and away, design #2 was the favorite with my student staff and will be on the Freshmen Week t-shirt in the fall.

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Nero Wolfe. I’ve wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of Rex Stout’s work, but I’ve enjoyed the stories I’ve read in Ellery Queen over the years. But the new A and E series is very stylish and quite enjoyable. The presence of the delicious Debra Monk in the pilot certainly didn’t hurt. Catch the show on Sunday nights and thank me Monday morning.

Speaking of Ellery Queen, I’m sad there isn’t more on the web about Edward D. Hoch, one of the magazine’s most prolific writers and creator of some of my favorite series detectives, including Nick Velvet.

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The dynamics of dynamite. An age-old question answered: how does dynamite fit into the holy trinity of Rock, Paper, and Scissors?

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Online ads that roam the screen. Not content to simply insert epileptic seizure inducing strobing banner ads, web sites are now turning to web animations that take over the screen and push their products with sounds and animation. They’re called “shoshkeles” (here’s a gallery of examples), and they’re probably the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever seen (although the Intel example is kind of cute).

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For a second, I thought that Ebay was now auctioning feral children.

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The elusive Chocodile. One of my student advisors has been talking all year about his favorite Hostess product, the Chocodile (which is a chocolate covered twinkie). I thought he was just making them up until he brought some back to school from Illinois and gave me one (they’re kind of dry. Ick).

The Brunching Shuttlecocks describes them best: “A rebel Twinkie. The Chocodile rejects the hypocritical sociability of the other Twinkies in their happy little packs of three, wrapped in plastic and denial, and instead chooses to go it alone, sitting in its chocolatey leather jacket and brooding about the futility of existence. But they’re hard to find and really not as tasty.”

Unfortunately, that’s about all I’ve been able to find about them on the web. The Chocodile is mysteriously absent from Planet Twinkie, the official Hostess website.

I figure they must be some kind of regional product that I’m unfamiliar with since I grew up in Alabama. That has lead to some interesting conversations with my Midwestern students: I discovered that none of them have ever heard of Goo Goo Clusters, but they all had seen Moon Pies, which I thought existed only in the deep South.

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I went to the dentist today for the first time in about a year and a half (my mommy used to set up all of that kind of stuff for me). The verdict is that I have some early gingivitis and that I need to get two fillings in my upper back molars. I know that millions of Americans suffer from gum disease, but I still feel very guilty and that I’m a bad person because of it. I am a leper.

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That’s right. This site is completely rendered with Cascading Style Sheets now. It looks like crap in Netscape 4, but I don’t care — users can still read the text of the page. I owe it all to the layout examples at bluerobot.com.

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Matt makes peace with Microsoft FrontPage. Back when I was an HTML newbie, I discovered the first version of Microsoft’s FrontPage and was amazed by all the tricks it could do to help you automate the creation and management of an entire site design. Then I learned how to use server-side includes, PERL, and PHP, and realized I could do so much more when I did it myself by hand. Add to that what a mangle FrontPage makes of your HTML code, and I vowed to never use it again.

Now I’m developing the website for our Residential Living department and I have to use FrontPage to take advantage of our new campus Microsoft web server and to ensure that people will be able to easily update the site after I leave Truman. And you know what? FrontPage 2000 isn’t the spawn of Satan that I remember. I’ve even been able to easily go in and add my own little bits of HTML code.

I’m actually excited by some of the features promised in the upcoming FrontPage 2002: tabs for multiple open documents, Usage Analysis Reports, automated survey creation, and improved HTML, CSS , and XML formatting.

I’d welcome any and all feedback on our new website.

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Is it just me, or is anyone else annoyed by how every single movie or TV show these days is preceeded or followed by logo clips from 4 or 5 different production companies? How many people does it take to produce something these days?

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